Sam Wystan Poshela Mhlongo (1940 - 2006) Obituary British Medical Journal [24 Feb 2007, p 431]

 

Professor of Family Medicine at MEDUNSA (Medical University of Southern Africa), now University of Limpopo.
(b 1940; q Charing Cross, London 1976; MSc, MRCGP; died in a head-on collision with a truck on his way home from work on 6 October 2006.

Sam Mhlongo was educated in Soweto and was proud to be a Zulu with maternal connection to the Royal House. He opposed apartheid and was imprisoned on Robben Island, where he was close to Nelson Mandela and much influenced by him. He went into exile from South Africa via Botswana, studied medicine in London, and became a GP in London. He was president of the African-Caribbean Medical Association from 1992. In 1998 he returned South Africa to a Foundation Chair at MEDUNSA at the invitation of the Gauteng Health Authority and the university.. President Mbeki appointed him adviser on Family Health with responsibilities for correcting historic problems and developing services in new communities in the Johannesburg area.. One such problem was the marked difference in extrapolations of regional and gender-related prevalence of HIV/ AIDS, linked largely to inaccuracies and cross-reactions in serological tests. Independently, these inaccuracies had led an expert Harvard team to abandon them in their surveys in Africa. President Mbeki, aware of these and other anomalies, set up a Commission in 1999 with independent international experts, to investigate reasons for them and for allegations by UN AIDS that HIV/ AIDS was more prevalent in South Africa than in any other country. Mhlongo and other local investigators knew that this was gender-related, and gave priority in MEDUNSA to investigation of an apparent excess of perinatal HIV/ AIDS. In deliberations with experienced members of the President’s Commission, including Luc Montagnier, he drew attention to the need for new approaches to break the deadlock which led the writers and subscribers of the millennial Durban Declaration to declare that “No end [was] in sight” to a pandemic of HIV/ AIDS. He became known as a well-qualified African opponent of such pessimism, especially on the part of outsiders unaware that local wisdom at all levels was exploring initiatives to overcome innate inequalities between the sexes, regions and socio-economic strata in the richest and most advanced society in the sub-Sahara.

In these and other endeavours, Mhlongo leaves warm memories of genuine, inspired concern, commitment and courage that he and some colleagues have maintained in the face of disparagement and threats locally, and from remote American and European sources. To his siblings, children and especially to his second wife Maria Giacomin from Brazil, this sudden loss of a sincere and genial man is a devastating sadness. To his many friends, community, country and international medicine, it leaves a gap in awareness and competence which will be very difficult to fill.

Gordon Stewart, Andrew Herxheimer